Google is ‘crooked’ and a bully, CEO of Fortnite-maker Epic Games testifies in Play Store trial
Google is ‘crooked’ and a bully, CEO of Fortnite-maker Epic Games testifies in Play Store trial
Epic alleges that Google has been engaged in illegal price-gouging by collecting commissions ranging from 15% to 30% on in-app digital transactions.
Google is ‘crooked’ and a bully, CEO of Fortnite-maker Epic Games testifies in Play Store trial::Epic alleges that Google has been engaged in illegal price-gouging by collecting commissions ranging from 15% to 30% on in-app digital transactions.
Oh no! One terrible corporation is saying the other terrible corporation is terrible!
Let me play a very sad tune on this really tiny violin I found.
You might think Epic is a terrible corporation. But their ability to affect meaningful change on your daily life is effectively non-existent. Unless you are making a living being a Steam evangelist or something.
But Google has a massive amount of control over the internet. Between search, Android, Maps, ads, Gmail, etc. The level of "terribleness" they can approach vastly overshadows even the most evil stances Epic could take.
So, this "both sides are bad" take is a bit ridiculous.
The magnitude may be different, but that just makes this a "kettle meet pot" situation instead of the reverse. It's still hypocrisy.
Pot calls kettle black.
Pot calls fellow pot black. 😝
the thing about that is, the kettle is black.
I'm against epic. Fuck them, hope they lose the lawsuit.
You know a company sucks when the public decides to side with fucking Google instead of them.
Seriously, I actually agree with what they're arguing in the lawsuit, but it's one of those "worst person you know manages to make a good point" situations. You don't want to actually agree with them, because you understand they have ulterior motives for having that position.
Despite Google being the bad guy in this, I certainly do not fucking want a shit-ass company like Epic to fucking win.
Actually Google wasn't that bad in the past. They did a lot of good, open sourced a lot of projects, made a lot of Linux contributions, gave us AOSP, Kubernetes, Golang, Tensor Flow, etc.
They even had a moonshot program, working on a lot of emerging technologies, and were in general pretty cool. I think things started to go downhill when they announced Alphabet, back then they started to optimize their operations by minimising the costs and maximizing their profits. In general this made their shareholders pretty happy and the rest pretty sour.
Why? What did they do?
They tried to beat Steam at their own game by paying studios a massive amount to release games exclusively on their platform. They brought "console exclusives" to fucking PC gaming and they can fuck off and eat shit for that.
They tried to entice gamers by giving them free copies of these games. They never, not once, tried to improve the quality of their application or give basic features that Steam has had for literally a decade. They don't actually care about customer satisfaction or good quality of service. They went on a stupid spree of buying game studios and basically killing them, just like EA used to do.
(A good example is when they bought Rocket League, which had a perfectly functional Linux-native version, but when they bought it they were like "FUCK LINUX" and literally removed the existing Linux-native version of Rocket League. That's when I stopped playing.)
They were in it to spend as much money as possible in an attempt to extract as much money as possible in a vain attempt to dominate the market. They failed at that miserably because these stupid chucklefucks don't actually know how to run a successful business by being good to their customers. Being good to your customer categorically is not just giving away free shit.
And if that shitty narcissistic bullshit wasn't enough, they also did dumb shit like buying the music site Bandcamp, doing literally fucking nothing with it for two years, and then selling it to fucking ad-men who immediately fired half the staff and started hollowing out the company.
I will never forgive them for killing bandcamp. The last place you could make sure a musician got 100% of the proceeds of buying their music (as opposed to Spotify which pays... $0.003 cents per stream. Also Bandcamp offered DRM-free fully lossless audio files (FLAC). There literally was not a better music service if you cared about 1. Paying artists fairly 2. Getting good quality audio and 3. Real ownership of the music itself where it can't be taken from you by changing licensing deals.
Tim Sweeney can go die in a fucking fire and I hope that same fire burns down Epic headquarters with all the C-Suite inside. They've always been a shitty company who cared about money first, and customers and their employees dead last. That's proof enough with their fucking idiotic spending spree followed up with selling stuff like Bandcamp and laying people off. They don't even have sound business strategy, a bunch of fucking loser ass morons who failed upward.
Yeah, I'm confused about the price gouging too. Not sure what they did exactly. I remember fondly that Apple had an issue with then and how they advertised app purchases, but not with Google Play Store.
Projection is a thing Epic. Be less Republican.
Takes one to know one? Or something silly.
Their crooked bullies.
Our strategic entrepreneurs.
I wholeheartedly believe google is breaking the law to maximize profits, but I also feel like this headline is designed to make it seem as though the people suing are just butthurt and that their primary complaint is that they don't like google personally and feel that their opinion as to whether google is kind and nice should be legally actionable.
No, seriously. Fuck google. Go FOSS or take your shitty closed source fucking scam and go to fucking hell. To everyone else, Take the pennies you pay and support the writers and the REAL hosters and not the infamous title stealing hedgemon scamper spies.
Discard closed source anything or you deserve the inevitable end of the world happening TO-FUCKING-DAY
You don't have to support Epic's ultimate goal of increasing their profit, to understand that the monopoly power this lawsuit is fighting is even worse. Apple and Google should not be able to gatekeep what kind of apps we get to use - any argument in favour of them basically boils down to "they let us avoid malicious apps" but you can have democratic orgs decide that instead of oligarchical cartels. And I don't necessarily mean the government, although government regulation would be a welcome move, I mean even more democratic:
In Finland, some of the largest grocery chains (think Walmart) are collectively, democratically owned - in other words, they operate in the same boring, stable, functional, and efficient manner as other grocery shops without being undemocratic(!). The average Finnish person has say in what products are being stocked, can be elected managers of stores, and the coop gives members 5% of their spending back (i.e. revenue sharing), among other things. [1] For reference, in the UK, we get a measly 1% back from grocery shop purchases, or from Amex with their cashback.
Sure, Epic won't give us this democratic org, but they do help us challenge the gatekeepers that are way more invested in working against giving us anything like this.
[1] https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2023/10/11/inside-the-walmart-of-finland/
Sure Timmy. Timmmmmmeeeeeyyyyyyy.
No shit Sherlock. Every company is. How they make stupid cash monies.
“Don’t be evil.”
Unlike on iOS, nobody forces them to use Google Play to distribute their app. Just don't use it. On iOS that's not an option, but here what's the problem?
The problem is that they crushed the competition with a fairly good free product for years. Setting all alternatives back, then they started prioritizing revenue, slowly, over time. Now Google free to use products are part of our routine, part of our lives, and the alternatives are either paid, poorly developed or have a low user base. Do you have an alternative to YouTube that has the same amount of content? It was the same issue when we left Teddit, but at a much lower scale and that was still painful (and it still is)
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney on Monday portrayed Google as a ruthless bully that resorts to shady tactics to protect a predatory payment system.
Sweeney’s more than two-hour stint on the witness stand in San Francisco came less than a week after Google CEO Sundar Pichai defended before the 10-member jury the way his company runs its Play Store for Android apps.
Much of Kravis’ his cross-examination appeared design to cast Sweeney as an executive primarily interested in bypassing a long-standing commission system to boost his video game company’s profits.
He attributed the disappointing response to Google machinations that made it a cumbersome process to do outside the Play Store and the use of pop-up “scare screens” warning of potential problems with the software.
Epic then filed antitrust lawsuits as part of what Sweeney framed as a crusade on behalf of all game makers as more play occurs on smartphones instead of consoles and PCs.
During his questioning of Sweeney, Google lawyer Kravis laid out the 30% commissions that Epic pays to Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo for transactions on the PlayStation, Xbox and Switch consoles without complaint while still raking in billions of dollars in profit from those platforms.
The original article contains 780 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 75%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!